“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars.” This was a statement by Black Elk in the late 1800’s. If everything is round, then all of the people should be the same, including their rights. Then why did the Europeans take control of the new world instead of living in peace with the Native Americans? In the beginning the white men thought they were more powerful than the Natives because they had all the equipment and supplies. As the time went on the Europeans ran out of food. They needed to survive and started to take away the Native people’s land. Now the Natives were the ones suffering. As the Europeans became more resourceful they didn’t need the Natives anymore. They just wanted their land and power.

“Percy’s Account,” written in the winter of 1609, describes how vicious the European people were to each other in Jamestown. An excerpt from this account states that there was cannibalism in Jamestown because of so much hunger and starvation. George Percy wrote, “ One of our Colline (people) murdered his wyfe (wife) Ripped (ripped) the Childe (child) out of her woambe (womb) and threw itt (it) into the River (river) and after Chopped (chopped) the Mother (mother) in pieces for his foode (food).” It also states how slim the people were. People were probably dying from starvation. With so many people dead then disease would start to spread so even more people would become ill from disease. The life for Europeans in the New World was probably starting to sound horrible to other men in Europe. To think that people would become so hungry that they would kill each other to survive must have been shocking. The choice between survival and kinfolk was probably a hard choice to make, but survival instincts would eventually take over.
Colonists in the New World were not only in distress from trying to survive attacks from other humans. Nature was another force at hand. “Watson and the Shark” is an oil painting by John Copley in 1778. There is a naked white man in the water with rough waves surrounding him. It appears that he is screaming for help while people in a small boat are trying to pull him back into the boat. As the people are reaching for him, a shark has his jaws open a foot away from the man in the water. Also in the boat is a white man trying to harpoon the shark as a black man throws a rope for the man in the water to grab hold of. This painting is symbolizing how violent and scary nature is, from the perspective of the Europeans. The water is dark and rough, symbolizing danger. In most cultures, white signifies innocence. The artist, John Copley, depicted the man being attacked by the shark as innocent so that it made nature look evil and scarier than it is. It is also saying that if the European settlers stayed in Europe, and didn’t come to the New World, they would not have gotten hurt. The people in the picture are trying to survive from an attack of nature which is threatening to wipe them out. They must have been frightened because of how many people have died before them from the lack of food and the scariness of nature.
The last words said by Chief Crazy Horse were spoken in 1877. It is called “We Preferred Our Own Way of Life.” He spoke of how cruel and unfair the white people were treating him and his people. His tribe was starving and the white men wouldn’t let them leave their reservation to hunt for buffalo. Chief Crazy Horse’s tribe would never have fought the Europeans if they had been given an opportunity to leave their sacred village. Crazy Horse spoke of this by saying, “They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same thing to us had we not defended ourselves and fought to the last. Our first impulse was to escape with our squaws and papooses (wives and children), but we were so hemmed in that we had to fight.” This shows how hard it was for the Natives to live in peace with the Europeans because of how unfair, selfish, and cruel the white men were being. They felt that they had no choice but to fight, flee, or die. The nastiness of this is that with both choices there was still the chance that the Native Americans could die.
Both the European settlers and the Native Americans were trying to survive in many different ways. The account by George Percy states how difficult it was for the white men to survive and adjust to life in the New World and how they were so hungry that they had to eat their own wives to survive in the harsh land. The painting depicting a European man being attacked by a shark shows how the Europeans settlers in a different country didn’t know the layout of the land, so they wouldn’t know what to eat, what to drink and which animals to avoid. The quote by Chief Crazy Horse states how hard it was for Native Americans to adjust to living with the white men who were trying to take control of the Natives sacred land. His quote demonstrated how vicious and cruel the Europeans were to the Native Americans. These few paragraphs show how Europeans and Native Americans were trying to survive. The difference between the two people was how they accomplished this task. It doesn’t make one way worse or better than the other, just different. If Columbus never found the New World, which sent a frenzy to claim land, what would the whole world look like today? Who would we know and not know of because the world was shaped differently?